This brings me to addressing how to develop a process, in this case in the context of project management. The single most important rule in developing a process is to focus on "value". Value is the centre of the process .... quite literally.

Step one in any process definition is to identify what the end result has to be. You then determine all the relevant steps or tasks to get from where you are now, or the beginning, to the end .... focussing ONLY on those steps that add value .... that get you closer to your goal.

I have a number of skills in a number of areas and have a few topics around which I can talk for 40 mins or 1-2 days!! You may consider them to be a bit eclectic and not really connected .... but in fact they are all connected through my project management, business investment and general management experience. All of them are well grounded in my personal journey ....good and bad!

I am mostly engaged through my consultancy firm HolisTech® Pty Ltd or my investment firm Padden Industries Pty Ltd, but I do have relationships with companies and businesses big and small through which I sometimes sub-contract.

Essentially, I would maintain that in these scenarios (see Evidence and Project Management (01)), project managers are making "claims", some even "vague claims", about the state of their project.

That vague claim is made in the spirit of getting the boss off your back or in the knowledge (perhaps mis-directed) that by the time anyone checks ... the project will be where they have reported it to be anyway! It is done with good intentions.

I have called the approach I prefer to use for project management an "evidence based" approach. So it behoves me to define this in some way.

I am not saying that project managers per se do not use evidence to understand their project. I just don't believe there are comprehensive approaches to that evidence base and I believe there is waaaay to much emphasis on the governance side of things, but that is for another blog.

My experience tells me that knowledge issues in schedule management fall into a number of broad areas:

=  understanding the concepts,
=  understanding the tools,
=  long term versus short term planning,
=  estimating and measuring, and
=  risk.

A while back, I was asked by a business colleague to assist in providing an insight into how an organisation could handle their knowledge asset better and how they could weave a network of advisors and small/medium enterprises.

After a couple of coffees and a long chat, he asked if I could encapsulate our discussion in a short brief. Always up for a challenge, I based the brief on the one hour executive briefing we (HolisTech Pty Ltd) provide to executives in Government agencies on leveraging Web 2.0.

If Web 1.0 is the broadcast web ("here I am and this is what I do" - it is read only - static) then Web 2.0 is the collaborative web ("here I am and we can do this together" - it is read/write and interactive - a far richer experience).

Milton, N, Knowledge Management for Teams and Projects, Chandos Publishing, Oxford, 2005

This book started slowly for me. But once I could see where Nick Milton was coming from, quite a few things "clicked". Being a project and program manager myself, some of his concepts resonated tremendously and I will implement them in some of the areas I work in including some of my clients.

Camrass, R. and Farncombe, M., Atomic: Reforming the Business Landscape into the New Structures of Tomorrow, Capstone Publishing Limited, UK, 2004.

Atomic attempts to identify the future business construct based upon trends identified today. Camrass and Farncombe take the analogy of an "atom" that can become part of larger molecules to form value adding business structures. These are more agile and focused organisations than the monolithic businesses today. To their credit, they try to identify those "atoms" rather than just generalise:.

I am exploring a number of concepts under an eclectic collection of
subject areas. I am also exploring some of these in my blog about small
and medium enterprises and micro-businesses at Lukim All. Undoubtedly, I will add to these in time.

Formal. Pat is a very experienced program and project manager with a strong academic background in the profession which includes post graduate project management qualifications. He has a significant and current consulting and business background with a particular strength in communicating complex concepts in simple and pithy ways including discussions, presentations, blogs and papers.

Informal. I am the normal family man - wife and two daughters, two dogs (german shepherd and golden retriever - stupid and cupid as the kids call them!), a stack of frogs in the gardne and a visiting family of magpies (a native Australian bird that is quite at home in the urban environment).